Benefits of LED Light Bulbs

If you haven’t switched over to using LED light bulbs in your home, now is the time. LEDs are an easy way to save energy and money. Especially if you often find yourself going from room to room turning off lights after family members have left them on! Put simply, if you leave a LED fixture on for 8 hours a day, it would take around 20 years before you’d have to replace it. Considering that you’d need more than 50 incandescent light bulbs to achieve this, the savings are real.

Top 5 Reasons to Switch to LED bulbs
• Last up to 50,000 hours
• Create less heat during use
• Contain no hazardous materials
• Prevent approximately a half ton of greenhouse gas emissions
• Save money

Curious how LEDs work? Basically, an LED produces light when electrons move around within its semiconductor structure. They don’t have a filament that will burn out like ordinary incandescent bulbs and they don’t get hot either. You probably didn’t know that a normal incandescent light bulb is actually a heater that emits light as a byproduct! Because over 90% of the energy is turned into heat, incandescent bulbs are extremely inefficient.

Many homeowners are hesitant to make the switch to LEDs because of the up-front cost. As more brands have entered the market, however, the bulbs have come down in price, even falling below $10. Don’t expect to see savings initially, but over the course of a year you’ll save money on replacement light bulbs as well as on your energy bill.

LEDs come in a variety of color choices, but the most popular are “warm soft”, “soft white” and “bright white”. “Warm white” and “soft white” produce a yellow hue which is closer to incandescent bulbs while “bright white” is similar to daylight. If you want red and green for Christmas or orange for Halloween, that’s available too!

Another plus to using LEDs is that you have the option to control them with your smartphone. Using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, homeowners can program an app-connected bulb to turn on or off on a schedule or when someone enters a room. Connected bulbs with the least amount of features start at $15. Do you want your lights to change color when your favorite team scores a goal? For $99 you can try a bulb that connects to the internet or your television and can change color in response to a schedule or something happening online.

The bottom line is that someday soon you’ll no longer be able to buy incandescent light bulbs even if you want to. Gradually replacing your bulbs with LEDs one room at a time will more than pay for itself in energy savings over time. According to Consumer Reports, switching just the 5 most used lights in your home could save around $44 a year on your electric bill. One method to go about replacing your incandescent bulbs is to begin by replacing bulbs one at a time as they burn out or install LEDs in only the hard to reach light fixtures. Whatever you choose, the sooner you switch, the sooner you’ll start saving money!